1. Introduction

It's a box! It's a robot! It's a box robot. Box robots are very popular on different robotics competitions involving LEGO Mindstorms like the FIRST LEGO League or World Robotics Olympiad. Let's start with a brief introduction and continue in the next videos with explanation on the features of the robot and why such robots are frequently used.

We have provided the building instructions for this robot as part of the whole course Box Robots for competition (this will require a course subscription)

With the shape of a box it is very easy to align this robot to different wall and to add very stable pinless attachments to it. The goal of the video is to discuss this feature of this particular robot construction.

Pinless Attachments

We have discussed pinless attachments a number of times at FLLCasts and will discuss it in the next part of the course

Aligning to Walls

It is important to use the walls to align the robot and fix its position during competitions

We have provided the building instructions for this robot as part of the whole course

Sometimes robot builders are so overwhelmed with the process of constructing a robot that they forget two very important parts. The brick should be accessible and the cables should not get in the way. These are referred by us as Brick Accessibility and Cable Management.

We have provided the building instructions for this robot as part of the whole course

This video discusses the fact the robot requires a few more parts that are available in the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 robotics sets. We have a number of other constructions that require less parts, but for this particular robot construction we have decided to go beyond the standard sets, cheaply buy a few more parts and build a whole box robot with them.

Buying LEGO parts

What you could do is search the Internet for "lego parts sale". We are not in any way connected with any of the sites, but we have used mainly BrickLink in the past for the times when we needed some additional parts.

Where do we have the additional parts from

Most of the part we have are collected over the years and we have hundreds of thousands of lego parts. It now occurs to me that for some of the competitions of FIRST LEGO League we have 15-20 fields and this is where most of the parts come from. We, however, do not like to use them because we understand our unique position of having so many parts. These robots make a little exception.

We have provided the building instructions for this robot as part of the whole course